Take your skin that’s smooth as a baby’s bottom and shove it. John Grade loves puckers, knots, sags, discolorations, ruts and rough spots.
Grade, pronounced Grotty, Circuit 2010 – Glazed ceramic bonded with gypsum polymer to corn-based resin embedded with marine netting.
9 x 24 x 24 feet
After its exhibition at Davidson Galleries, Circuit will spend a year on a mountain, accumulating changes as a fast-forward into old age.
Jerry Pethick mined the vein of weathering change before Grade. Time Top was Pethick’s last major work before his death in 2003. Granted, Grade’s work is more of a performance than Pethick’s.
Grade:
But Pethick had a better idea of what works in a gallery. He tended to keep the inside and outside separate. Not for him would be Grade’s forlorn and drab grouping of dark husks in a gallery. Disintegrating in nature (entirely biodegradable, by the way) Circuit is bound to produce a more interesting series of photos, at the least.
At Davidson till Oct. 2.
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